I’m glad when Mother Nine chooses the babies’ sleeping-room as my scolding place — you can’t use switches there.

The little ones are silent in their lungmossy cribs until one of them opens her mouth, makes a sound that could split a ceiling — even the ceiling of hushingstone that looms over our heads. Mother Nine picks her up, swaying her back and forth to soothe her. “In there,” she says, nodding toward a chest, scuffed and stained after years of salted damp. “Bandages.”

My hands quake as I search for a strip of cloth to stop the bleeding.

Mother Nine only speaks again once I’ve wound the flickermoth silk around my thumb. “Do you know what our rules are for, Delphernia?”

My eyes are bleary with tears and I don’t care, I don’t care, I don’t care what they’re for. The bawling baby seems to feel the same way.

The room is full of babies, but this one is the newest. Every girl who’s born in Blightsend is given a mirror on the day of her birth. And what she does with it determines whether she ends up here or out in the world, scrubbing the floors the Masters tread their shoes on.

This baby was dropped off last week, wrapped in an embroidered cloak. She must have turned away from her reflection, like the rest of us did. That’s why they call us turnaway girls. Because we turned our faces from polished gold instead of scouring it for our own eyes.

Girls who make shimmer need to be selfless, need to hold whole worlds in their bones, need to listen, listen, listen. They need to turn away from who they are and who they wish to be.

“The rules,” says Mother Nine, “are there to teach you how to survive. You want to live, don’t you?”

“Yes,” I say.

But that’s only partly true.

Because what I do not say is this: I want to live outside.

“Right,” says Mother Nine. “Here’s an education for your eyes.”

She marches to the back of the room, where she places the baby, spine bent with screaming, on a table engraved with crashing waves.

“What are you going to do?” I say. A hurting’s coming, I’m sure of it. My thumb beats in an aching counterpoint to my heart.

“After the Sea-Singer was swallowed by the sea,” says Mother Nine, circling a thumb and index finger around each of the baby’s white wrists, “the Ninth King passed a law. It requires that part of every turnaway girl’s heart be removed.”

“Removed?” I am clutching my own wrist now.

A hurting’s coming, a hurting’s coming —

Mother Nine goes on holding the baby’s wrists. She stands very still, closes her metallic eyes, dips her chin, her palms facing the child.

And then I see what she’s doing.

Sometimes I forget that Mother Nine used to be a girl like me.

The baby’s sobs are coming out hoarse like a soughing wind.

And Mother Nine is letting them drift through her bones.

She’s making shimmer.

But the strands at her back are not lustrous gold — they’re crooked bands of silver and shadow. They jerk in the air like birds with broken wings.

She turns toward the grime-gleaming strands, takes them in her hands and kneads them. I stand on my tiptoes to see what she’s doing — what she’s making.

When her fingers unfurl, I see it — a small bracelet of dull silver.

She puts it around the baby’s wrist, leaves it there for a few breaths, and the little thing falls silent — her lips a neat line, her blue eyes dripping blank-blinking tears. Mother Nine takes the bracelet off again and pockets it. There’s a faint darkness where the metal used to be, as though storming clouds have mistaken the baby’s skin for the sky.

A bead of bitterness collects behind my tongue. “You took out the part of her that cries.”

Mother Nine undresses the baby and crumples up her sleeping-robe, fetching a mud-dyed smock for her instead.

“You took out the part of her that cries,” I say again.

“I’ve rid her of questions,” Mother Nine says, holding the baby up. “She’s satisfied now. She’s content.”

I look around the room. All the other babies are sleeping peacefully, as though sleep itself is dreaming of them.

And I know that she’s taken their questions, too.

I run along the rows of cribs.

Every single one has a ring of cloudy grayness sweeping her skin.

“You’ve done it to all of them,” I say. My voice is a fist.

I’ve never seen a scar on my arm, but maybe I wasn’t looking hard enough. I didn’t even know I needed to look. I start to roll up my sleeves.

Then Mother Nine is kneeling before me, smoothing my cuffs. “You don’t have one,” she says.

I stare at the wrinkled space between her eyebrows. “I don’t?”

“The day the Sea-Singer’s death was announced,” she says, looking past me, “was the day you arrived at the cloister. There was a festival in Blightsend to celebrate the new law — the Festival of Questions. There was music while I did it. Your class was the first. I bundled you into your crib — you always slept so deeply, as though you had lullabies swirling your veins — and, as the others began to cry, I drew it out of them. All their wanting and all their needing. I made warped silver of their longings. I bound them with it. I showed them how useless it was — just dead metal to them and nothing warm, nothing that would ever make anything better. And they stopped. One by one, they stopped. No tantrums since.”

“I don’t understand. Did you remove their ability to cry? Or their ability to ask?”

“A cry and a question come from the same place in a girl’s heart.”

“And me —”

“I couldn’t. I couldn’t.”

Mother Nine said the baby was satisfied. Content. But I am not. I have questions like claw tips in my stomach. I have a buzzing in my blood that never stops. A buzzing I can’t portion into words now. I swallow and swallow, but my tongue stays fat, filling my mouth like a spoonful of seaflower stew.

“Do you know who the Sea-Singer was, Delphernia?” Mother Nine is whispering. Her eyes are brimming with unfalling tears. “She was a girl who asked questions. She became a woman who asked questions. And there is nothing Blightsend hates more than that.”

She gets to her feet. She runs a hand over the top of my head.

“I gave you a gift, Delphernia. I left your heart alone. For the First Mother’s sake, don’t waste all that by drenching your own lungs.”

Gift. A soft kiss of a word. Mother Nine could never give a gift. What she gave me was a burden, heavy as a spadeful of soil. What she gave me was a way of knowing what I lack. If I didn’t have questions, I’d be like the othergirls. I’d be good at making shimmer and I’d be chosen by one of the Masters and I’d never know that I was missing singing.

“Go on, now,” Mother Nine mutters. “Be a good girl.”

The thing is, though, good girls don’t sing in hollow trees, don’t meet eyes with Masters on the wrong side of walls. They don’t lift their gaze in the whisper-room, don’t walk toward the First Mother’s face. They don’t smile when they hear of the Sea-Singer’s transgressions, the fires she lit in caught gardens, the way she desecrated the Garden of All Silences by flinging her voice against metal.

But I do.

That’s how I know I’ll never be good — unless I cut out my own heart entirely.

Unless Mother Nine plucks my voice right out of my throat.